Bio:

Growing up the child of Greek immigrants young Alex Megalos was told that he always had to be better than the other kids. His father told him he must study more, and work harder to gain the respect of people who would look down on his immigrant roots. For eight-teen years Alex believed his father and sacrificed his social life and interests, finally getting admitted to half the Ivy’s and nearly a dozen other top schools.

Alex ended up choosing Harvard where he continued to excel for his first semester until he took a class on folklore that changed his life. Suddenly he was studying something that seemed interesting to him, and which also celebrated his Greek roots and the stories he’d heard from his grandparents growing up. To his father’s dismay Alex switched his course of study from pre-med to Anthropology and never looked back.
Alex became fascinated with stories of the occult and mysticism, studying shamanic traditions and medieval alchemy. He went straight on to doctoral work in Archaeology, eventually scoring a coveted spot on a research dig in Siberia.

After months excavating the tomb of a Scythian warlord out of the taiga Alex found himself working on translating the strange runes on a silver torc. As he traced the runes and said them out loud the torc began to emit a sickly green glow. Alex stopped but could feel the he was no longer alone in the lab, another presence had manifested in the lab, coiling in the shadows. As Alex watched the presence extended tendrils of blackness across the floor, inching towards where he sat, torc still in hand. As they inched closer they cast a deathly chill into the room, causing frost to form on the windows and Alex’s breath to appear in white puffs. Before the shadow could reach him Alex shook himself from his torpor and took a knife in hand, scoring the runes on the torc. The presence immediately receded, leaving behind only the touches of frost that were rapidly pooling into damp spots.

Suddenly all of the tales he’d read, that had been dismissed by his professors as pre-modern attempts to rationalize the unknown were cast in a new light. The truth wasn’t that the things that go bump in the night were crude attempts at social control, they were real. Magic was real, and it was terrifying.

Alex told no one, but he redoubled his work, writing his dissertation on the mystic meaning of the torc from the Scythian tomb. In the process he discovered that it had been used to bind a spirit that had risen at the warlords death and spread disease among the neighboring tribes before a young shaman had bound it to the elemental silver. Alex also discovered that the runes, while ancient, were not Scythian, and had appeared at least a dozen times over the past 2500 years across the globe, most recently written in the blood of a CIA field operative who had been murdered in Morocco in 1988.

After he received his Ph.D. Alex interviewed with the CIA and told them about his findings in Siberia and how they related to the murdered agent. To his great surprise he was offered a job in the directorate of analysis and shown the full files on the dead agent, including the silver torc identical to the one he had found in Siberia.

Unfortunately for Alex life in the Agency drew him away from the cold case and forced his to focus on more active issues for national intelligence. His obsession had started to impact his reputation and Alex was eager to show he was more than a one trick pony. Still he began to notice certain patterns, from 2002 to 2005 seven field agents in Iraq were killed under mysterious circumstances, their bodies frozen solid, His superiors suspected some sort of chemical weapon being developed by Al Quaeda or the Iranians but Alex couldn’t help wondering if he might have ended up the same if the frozen darkness had been able to touch him.

A breakthrough of sorts occurred when Alex was able to examine one of the bodies alongside Dr. Samantha Clark of Forensic Solutions Inc., a CIA contractor. Dr. Clark seemed at a loss to explain the man’s death, but Alex saw that the freezing was most intense in the man’s chest where the skin had blackened due to the intense cold. Using advanced scanning technology Dr. Clark was able to show that the cold had spread from a wound that bore the shape of one of the runes Alex had seen before. Alex had his confirmation that something was still out there, active and pursing some sort of agenda. At Alex’s request Dr. Clark falsified the cause of death, Alex was not going to go public until he knew for sure that there was something more than just his impressions.

For the past few years Alex has been liaising with the DEA on the matter of the mystical and religious significance of a number of cartel killings along the US/Mexico border. His main DEA contact has been a particularly zealot agent by the name of Petyr Kowalski who takes the job far too seriously, and who refuses to even discuss the possibility that the cartel is using a combination of psychoactive drugs and pseudo-Catholic ritual to brainwash their mules

Currently Alex and Kowalski have tracked a motorcycle gang called the Strangers with cartel ties from Juarez to St. Louis in the hopes of getting more information of how the cartel is recruiting and moving the drugs.